10 October

It's World Porridge Day

So we are drinking a...

Atholl Brose

Did you start your day with a bowl of porridge? Whatever you had for breakfast, consider yourself lucky – many others start their day chronically hungry. World Porridge Day is an international event to raise funds for Mary's Meals, a charity that aids starving children in developing countries.

The charity provides nutritious mugs of maize porridge (likuni phala) as part of its daily school feeding programme to more than 1.1 million of the world's poorest children. We suggest you donate to Mary's Meals and celebrate your generosity and Scotland's national dish with an Atholl Brose. This very tasty Scotch whisky based cocktail is flavoured with oatmeal water, made by infusing porridge oats in hot water.

London Bridge moved to Arizona

This day in 1971 today, the town of Lake Havasu City in Arizona debuted a new bridge - London Bridge.

When it had become too weak to carry the volume of London traffic required, Arizonan entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch had bought the bridge, for almost two and a half million dollars. He then had shipped the individually numbered stones from the dismantled bridge all the way out to Arizona and rebuilt London Bridge over a local canal, a project which took four years to complete. Visitors can now enjoy a 90-minute tour of the bridge, taking in strafing scars from World War II, and it is second only to the Grand Canyon as a tourist attraction in Arizona.

Today is, of course also 10/10

Or, in Taiwan, it's Double Ten Day. The day when the Republic of China commemorates getting rid of the Last Emperor and setting up the Republic of China in 1908. And, yes, we are still talking about Taiwan. Because Taiwan's legal name is the Republic of China. What most of us think of as China is technically the People's Republic of China and celebrated its own national day a few days back. That commemorates when it was established in 1949, after the last leadership basically retreated to Taiwan.

Taiwanese celebrate today with lion dancers, drum teams, fireworks and kaoliang, the sorghum spirit that comes close to the status of a national drink. We are marking today more conservatively, with one of our favourite drinks, a Tenner Martini.